First, the APPP reckons (building on the work of lots of others like Mushtaq Khan and Merilee Grindle) that the development industry has gone seriously wrong (what follows are direct quotes from the paper, apart from comments by me in square brackets):

‘In 20 years of ‘good governance’, millions of dollars have been spent on programmes to make private enterprise work in Africa as it does in the US, elections work as they do in Sweden, audit authorities as in Germany and civil society campaigns as in the Netherlands – with results that have been mixed at best. In its present form, ‘good governance’ is not evidence-based.

From ‘best practice’ to ‘best fit’

The ‘universal best practice’ approach to governance for development is bankrupt. There are no institutional templates that are valid everywhere and for all stages in a country’s development. Best fit implies

a) ‘working with the grain’, meaning building on existing institutional arrange­ments that have recognisable benefits: institutional innovations work when they build constructively on what already exists, borrowing institutional understandings from local society to build ‘practical hybrids’, marrying up modern professional standards or scientific principles (e.g. about what constitutes good health care) with the moral economy and previous practices of the area. [couldn’t agree more]

b) shift from direct support to facilitating local problem-solving: This has a clear implication for donor-financed and NGO-delivered support to self-help at the local level. Direct funding of groups and organisations inevitably means specifying institutional templates, for control and accountability purposes if nothing else. This can have very negative effects on capacities for genuine self-help. More attention should be given to the enabling environment. [such as?]

Adopting a ‘best fit’ approach also implies relying less on the congenial assumption that all good things go together. There is a widespread assumption that the solution to chronic development problems is more political democracy and greater citizen participation so that governments are more often ‘called to account’. This is an attractive idea, but it is more ideological than evidence-based. APPP is adding to the evidence that, in poor developing countries:

democracy is a desirable long-term goal but not a reliable route to better public policies in the short and medium term

citizen pressure is at best a weak factor and at worst a distraction from dealing with the main drivers of bad governance. [don’t worry, I’ll respond to this stuff at the end]

Voting and public goods

Democracy is definitely a desirable goal and an effective way of improving public policies in all societies in the long run. However, the formal arrangements of liberal democracy have radically different effects in different kinds of social and economic contexts. Many young democracies are not particularly developmental. In many settings, clientelism (vote-buying in its various forms) is cheaper and more reliable for power-hungry politicians than promises to improve policies and the delivery of public goods. [yep, as set out in back in 2005 in Matthew Lockwood’s great book, The State They’re In]

Refocusing on development leadership

What poor developing countries really need are leaders who, as well as constructing sufficiently inclusive coalitions of support, are able to show that they can ‘get things done’. In Africa, the most relevant dimension of variation among regimes is between more and less developmental forms of neopatrimonialism. [alarm bells – see below]

Implications for aid?

External actors should base their decisions and their policy dialogue on a thorough understanding of the prevailing institutional arrangements. [definitely, but try doing that when the typical DFID staffer moves on every two years. In any case, as Sue Unsworth pointed out at the APPP launch, DFID and others have been doing this stuff for years, f – or example in the ‘Drivers of Change’ programme, now rechristened the ‘political economy approach’ – the problem is that it doesn’t have much impact on how donors actually behave – the way aid organizations are structured seems to make it very difficult to put this ‘political economy approach’ into practice.]

linking ‘ownership’ more explicitly to political leadership, and ‘alignment’ to this concept of ownership

working with parliaments and the public in the North to create the conditions in which more aid can work in a ‘best fit’ way. [ah yes, getting tabloids to say that corruption isn’t that big a deal really…..]

Whether development efforts are country-owned or not depends on the orientation of the country’s political leadership. However desirable democratisation and civil society mobilisation may be, they are not relevant criteria of ownership.”

So what do I think of all this (in addition to the comments in square brackets)?

I love the challenge to the hubris and arrogance of the tired old northern-centric good governance discourse on development which basically argues that ‘they’ have to be more like ‘us’ (or at least an idealized version of us): elections are invariably good, all corruption is bad etc. This completely ignores both our own history and the reality of the existing institutions that hold the key to development. I also like the distinction between pro and anti-developmental forms of patrimonialism (personalistic systems of power, often but not always based on the distribution of cash and favours to buy loyalty) – that seems much more useful and historically grounded than the ‘all corruption is bad for development’ mindset. The practical hybrids idea sounds intriguing, but I’d need to see some more examples to be convinced (there are a few in the IDS bulletin, which is a start). Overall, we definitely have to move towards this kind of politically literate, contextual and humble approach to understanding development. Brilliant.

What alarms me?

The APPP is right to stress the importance of leadership, but how to prevent that degenerating in the minds of donors into traditional diplomatic ‘decent chap-ism’ – Kagame’s a decent chap, so let’s bung him lots of aid. As we know, decent chaps don’t always stay that way (the curse of the donor darling). How can a country graduate from an individual decent chap to an institutionalised, effective state? Within Sub-Saharan Africa, only Botswana seems to have managed it so far – at the launch one speaker held up the Ivory Coast of the 1980s as a good example of developmental patrimonialism, hardly reassuring. And the ringing quote at the end of the briefing: ‘it is time to abandon the polite fiction that the politicians in charge of most poor developing countries are really committed to development’ rather seems to undermine their argument (or at least highlights the shortage of decent chaps).

The risk is a slide into ‘Asian values’ type arguments that the non-monetary aspects of development will just have to wait. As Sam Hickey asked at the ODI launch ‘at what point is ‘good enough governance’ selling Africa short?’ The danger of an Asian values type focus on benign but undemocratic leaders is that you may get the autocracy without the developmental payoff at the end – lots of autocrats really mess up their countries.

The underlying vision of development seems to focus on structure with little space for agency (apart from decent chaps of course). Not much room for Amartya Sen’s ‘Development as Freedom’ or for universal human rights. An example from my colleague Caroline Sweetman comes to mind – some while ago when she was working as a gender adviser in Ethiopia, a women’s group asked her for ‘education and sharper knives’ to make female genital mutilation less dangerous. Others were urging donors to support such procedures in hospitals, to reduce risks to women. Would these be acceptable examples of ‘practical hybrids’?

And as you’d expect, I was quite upset by the dismissal of the role of civil society. While I have some sympathy with

sorry guys, you're just a 'distraction'

the idea that donors unloading millions of dollars on unsuspecting CSOs may not be a great idea, writing off the influence of civil society per se does not seem (dare I say it) particularly evidence based. Do they not think the huge output of the Citizenship Development Research Centre on the role of civil society in long term political change (for example the iconic example of South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign) worthy of consideration? How would they explain what’s happening in North Africa and the Middle East – hardly decent chap-driven processes, surely? Or are they saying that none of this work applies even slightly to the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa because of some unique aspect of its culture or politics?

My conclusion both from the briefing and the discussion at the ODI launch recently, is that the logical (though presumably unintended) conclusion from the APPP’s findings is that there is simply no role (apart from funding more research of course) for donors in governance work – it’s just too complex, too context specific, too likely to go wrong. And what the APPP is suggesting as alternatives are probably just too incompatible with the political and organizational realities of northern donorship. Speakers from aid agencies kept asking for ‘takeaways’ (policies, not Chinese meals) and didn’t get a convincing reply, except for yet more things they shouldn’t be doing. A reasonable answer, based on this paper, might be, ‘forget all that complicated political stuff – it’s beyond you. Go back to funding vaccines and textbooks, and concentrate on a ‘do no harm’ agenda at home – tax havens, climate change etc.’

These are just some initial reflections on a fascinating piece of work. Be prepared for me to do U turns on all sorts of things as I try and get to grips with it….. Next up, some highlights from the IDS bulletin.

5 comments

Just to pick up on one facet of this completely fascinating post… “concentrate on a ‘do no harm’ agenda at home.” I think the development discourse pendulum has moved much too far away from a ‘do no harm’, or rather ‘stop doing the harm that we’re doing’ agenda. We have got so busy discussing good governance and so on that we don’t focus enough on the pieces of the jigsaw that really do belong to us in the north.

Great post, Duncan…basically because you pick up on the dilemma perfectly. On the one hand, no one wants to swallow hook, line and sinker the bland arguments on the need for ‘participation’ that have been peddled around for the last couple of decades (since the end of the Cold War – what a coincidence!). But, as you suggest, there is also something rather fundamentally wrong with this traditional ‘decent chap’ approach to deciding which countries ‘deserve’ aid and support (the Brits, by the way, we are terrible at this – just look at East Africa!) Also as you note, the ‘realist’school, as reflected by several members of SOAS and (it would seem) IDS, criticise without every proposing what should be done (apart from priming ‘development’- wow, gee wiz, that gets us out of a tight corner, doesn’t it?). This latter group also seem prone to ‘good chapism’- i.e. a rather superficial evaluation of whether a government (or rather their leader) is ‘pro-developmental’or not. My greatest fear is is that we are ‘selling people short’in recipient countries (Sam Hickey hit the nail on the head with his comment that you cite) – this condescending idea that poor people either don’t understand the principles of democracy, or are incapable of sufficient ‘restraint’to avoid everything collapsing into chaos. The feeling on the street in some countries of East Africa is that the donors are supporting their local dictators, and despite all our rhetoric about democracy and civil participation, we don’t really believe a word of it ourselves. I have even heard that, in some of these countries, foreign nationals will be targeted in case of civil unrest, as a result of this hypocrisy. Let’s hope that Tunisia and events in the rest of the Middle East lead to a profound reflection about how we interact with some of these governments. If not, it will come back to haunt us….

Thanks for highlighting a very interesting programme (APPP), and thanks for your critical thoughts.
Like you, I do agree that APPP is raising some very interesting questions. Whether they have the right answers, I doubt with you. It reminds me of Chabals’ and Daloz’ argument in ‘Africa Works’. It was a great description of how Africa works in practice, and as a practitioner it was a very welcome change from reading how it SHOULD work. But knowing how Africa works does not create a recipe for improvement. You need to know what is there, before you can think of improvements. But making what works just working better may also not be the solution.
So, great analysis. And I’m sure it has some elements of the answer. But more work needs to be done. I look forward to your further thoughts on it.

And how can IDS bulletin not be freely available on the web, while it is publishing publicly funded research?
Rinus, SNV Tanzania, Mwanza

Thanks for your very encouraging blog, and thanks also to some of the people who have commented. I know that APPP Director David Booth is planning to respond to several of the points made, but in the meantime I would like to say a word about the idea that in the hands of policy makers our concept of ‘developmental patrimonialism’ risks falling into the trap of what you call diplomatic ‘decent-chapism’. What our theory of developmental patrimonialism does is to provide an analytical framework for understanding why some patrimonial regimes are good for development and why some are not. In APPP’s view, this has to do with whether or not a structure exists for centralizing economic rent management and gearing it to the long term. In forthcoming outputs we provide some pointers to the kinds of institutions and mechanisms that facilitate this type of rent-management, and thus a rather more solid basis for assessing the developmental credentials of a neo-patrimonial regime than the personal qualities of the President (although you are right that these are likely to be a part of the story). This ought to assist aid agencies in knowing if their current policies are correctly tailored to the nature of the regime in power or if a new fit is needed. We also discuss some of the factors that can cause developmental patrimonial regimes to lose their way, as Ivory Coast assuredly did after the 1970s. When it comes to the very topical question of authoritarian regimes and democratic sentiment, it seems unlikely to us that regimes on the right track developmentally would be swept away by popular movements of the kind we have seen recently in the Middle-East, but given the complexity and unpredictability of street politics, there may be rare cases where this occurs.

This is a conversational blog written and maintained by Duncan Green, strategic adviser for Oxfam GB and author of ‘From Poverty to Power’. This personal reflection is not intended as a comprehensive statement of Oxfam's agreed policies.